IN JOHN Carpenter’s mesmeric and bleak 1981 classic, Escape From New York, Kurt Russell plays the rogue Purple Heart anti-hero Snake Plissken, who is charged with rescuing Donald Pleasance’s stricken US president.

Manhattan has become a lawless, walled penitentiary housing America’s most violent criminals and the President has crash-landed among them.

Russell is released from incarceration and tasked with locating and rescuing the President within 24 hours. In doing so he has to face down a bizarre assortment of criminal grotesques ruled over by the Dook of New York City, played by Isaac Hayes.

A remake has often been mooted but, regrettably, has yet to materialise. Any efforts now to revive it, though, have been rendered redundant by the antics of an all-too-real US President. Dystopian and unsettling as Carpenter’s cult creation was, it is like Camberwick Green compared with what is beginning to emerge in present-day America.

Indeed it may even soon be possible to construct a cinematic variation on Carpenter’s original theme. In this one, the action has moved to Washington and the Capitol Building. America has become a brutal, military dictatorship led by wild-eyed demagogue who has suspended all elections due to the inconvenient reality of them returning too many representatives of inappropriate lineage such as Asians and Mexicans.

The President, who only travels at night in full military uniform in the style of the former president of Uganda, Idi Amin, has moved his headquarters to Disneyland where The Lion King and Bambi are playing constantly on a loop for him in his underground bunker.

At all times he is accompanied by the only two men he trusts: a couple of foppish Englishmen called Morgan and Farage. Holding out against him are a group of district judges holed up somewhere near the Capitol Building. The president is determined to find them because, while they are alive, a flickering candle of democracy exists.

And so, Snake Plissken, now portrayed as a gay, black former state trooper who speaks with a Mexican accent, rides again to free the judges before the mad President can get his hands on them.

Of course, it will soon become too easy to caricature the presidency of Donald J Trump as yet another executive order unstitches the US constitution and drags the country back another decade. What is becoming all too apparent in reality though, is the speed with which Trump is dismantling all opposition.

His paranoid ravings about what he now considers America’s enemy within carry echoes of the McCarthyism of the 1950s. In 2017 actors, singers, writers, editors and journalists are regarded as the country’s internal axis of evil.

Soon White House press briefings will be infiltrated by a motley procession of swivel-eyed and scarecrow right-wing bloggers who will go forth from that place and announce to the world that in the new age of Trump one plus one equals three.

A new US flag bearing only one star will replace the old stars and stripes. The existence of 50 stars, you see, conveys irresponsible inferences of socialism and collectivism. An approved list of movie themes will be issued and directors departing from these will be hounded and rounded up on suspicion of anti-Americanism. Them ‘Injuns’ will be the bad dudes once more.

Any more stunts by Canadian president Justin Trudeau such as offering to receive visitors from Trump’s verboten seven nations will soon have consequences. The idea of building a wall along the US-Canadian border will be mooted – not to keep the slacker Canadians out but to keep American liberals in.

In keeping with Trump’s new method of interpreting photographs, Nasa scientists will be ordered to doctor pictures from space to show that American settlers have colonised Mars and several other planets prior to announcing that America has conquered the known universe.

Any loose talk of superior civilisations will be liable to prosecution under the revived law of witchcraft. All schools will be issued with new maps of the world minus the seven rogue Muslim nations and any others whom Trump might deem to be getting ideas above themselves.

North Korea will come in from the cold and president Kim Jong-un will be invited to undertake the first state visit by a premier of the wee nation on the 38th parallel. President Kim will appear on North Korean state television to tell his people that President Trump’s mum was a former seamstress in Pyongyang. President Trump will proclaim a new special relationship with North Korea and condemn The New York Times and The Washington Post for portraying the communist republic in such a negative manner.

“It’s another example of post-truth journalism,” Trump will tell Kim and ask how effective it is to execute political opponents by blowing them up with an anti-tank gun.

Trump has already managed to convince many of his supporters that the reason why Hillary Clinton got almost three million votes more than him in the Presidential election was down to the Democrats rigging the ballot. In fact, if there was any vote-rigging it was carried out by the Republicans when they made it more difficult for younger voters and African-Americans to vote by introducing measures aimed at reducing same-day registration and enabling polling officials to challenge voters more easily.

A significant reduction in African-American votes occurred in some key battleground states.

Theresa May displayed her inexperience and naivete in allowing herself to be trapped in this web. Yet, in several respects, some of Trump’s more vivid rhetoric and more sinister motives have borrowed greatly from the recent conduct of May’s Conservative Party and especially its anti-European cohort who now hold sway in the country.

The irony of listening to Boris Johnson attempting to distance himself from President Trump’s anti-Muslim ordinances could not have been lost on anyone who remembers the huge campaign poster produced by Ukip during the EU referendum depicting an endless line of wretched refugees and asylum-seekers wending their way to the UK.

And if you want to discover the origins of post-truth politics look no further than the bogus claims about the UK sending £350m a week to Europe or of the false scaremongering of the No side during the first referendum on Scottish independence.

Trump too will take comfort from the British Conservatives’ anti-trade union laws and the way in which, following the corporate avarice that led to the 2008 credit crunch, the banks have been redeemed and poor people punished. And in the mass tax avoidance of corporate UK revealed by the Panama Papers, President Trump has already found that he is in good company.

So we can lampoon this pantomime president until our liberal hearts bleed and we can paint our wry post-apocalyptic nightmares about what the future holds under Trump. In the UK, though, we have seen it all before and, one way or another, we have all tolerated it.